Waldo's Gift: Capturing the Moment

If you were to somehow draw a map of the UK along cultural rather than demographic lines, suddenly London wouldn't be so disproportionately large. After all, the most influential pop group of all time came from a small city a few hundred kilometres north of the capital. Bristol is another town that has carved out a significant place for itself on this map. Today, it is perhaps going through a slight identity crisis, or at least it is having to reinvent itself. Many people still associate it with genres such as trip-hop and drum and bass that in the '90s gave the city huge international exposure. But Bristol's music scene has continued to evolve, and more recently, popular bands such as Idles are helping to put it on the map again.

Like in many UK cities today, Bristol's new jazz scene is thriving. Recently All About Jazz had the opportunity to meet with Alun Elliott-Williams, Harry Stoneham and James Vine, the three members of Waldo's Gift. One of their tracks was featured on the 2019 UK jazz compilation album Whiskey Juliet Foxtrot and they have now released a full length album, Improvisations. The clue is in the name. The album features excerpts from one of their live sets at the Gallimaufry in Bristol from December 2018. It is all fully improvised.

A fascinating feature of spontaneously created music is that it is intrinsically ephemeral, a pure product of the moment. Think of any jazz record (and Improvisations can certainly be considered one): each solo is a recorded trace of an instant of genesis, and had the album been recorded shortly before or after, it would surely sound completely different. This idea of capturing the moment quickly became a sort of obsession for the trio who tried to carry the concept into all the stages of their creative process.

So how might you go about that? By getting an artist to do stream of consciousness painting to the sound of your music. Or by filming a dancer reacting to it for the very first time. The latter scene you can catch in the new music video released for their single "Kaleidoscope." It is an outstanding effort from an exciting new band, and their sound, seamlessly weaving through complex math-rock beats, drum and bass grooves and virtuosic jazz fusion, is one of the most original to come out of the Bristol scene.

All About Jazz: How did the Improvisations project come about?

James Vine: The band is about two and a half years old now. Three years ago me and Alun met in Bristol and we started jamming. We were making some cool sounds and this venue, the Gallimaufry, was looking for something to happen on a regular basis, every Wednesday. A sort of residency. I knew the owner so I told him that I'd just met this guy and we were doing some cool stuff and would he be interested. He agreed to book us a one off gig and see from there. At that time, Harry had just moved to Bristol. Him and Alun had been to university together in Southampton.

AAJ: How did you (James) and Alun meet?

Alun Elliott-Williams: I used to play with James' partner, doing jazz duo gigs. James would often show up, we got to know each other and he eventually suggested we play together. Harry happened to be coming down to Bristol around that time. He was mainly a guitarist before joining the band but I told him to play the bass instead.

JV: The band almost came about because there was this residency gig. We started playing at the Gallimaufry on Wednesdays and as a result of gigging every week, we quickly got bored of always playing the same tunes. So we naturally started improvising more and more, to the point where we ended up doing entire sets of fully improvised music. We got better and better at it and were able to start composing on the fly.

AAJ: What was the musical starting point? What were you aiming for when you first started playing?

AEW: The first stuff we were writing was actually more in the cross-over between metal and math-rock. There were jazz elements, but it was very arranged and composed. However, due to the nature of improvisation, we've since been free to explore whatever we want.

Harry Stoneham: At the time we had actually recorded an EP of completely composed riffs. We had recorded three of our early tunes. But at that stage it wasn't representative of us as a band, so we gave it another year to fully explore the improv thing.

JV: That was basically a math rock EP and quite different to the kind of sound you hear on the Improv record. We were already playing that sort of sound at our gigs but for some reason we didn't think it made sense to record an album of fully improvised music. We had some written tunes we could have recorded, but we felt like that didn't work either. So we had a bit of an identity crisis. After a while, a friend said to us 'you guys are writing an album's worth of music every week at this venue, so record one of the gigs, or record five of the gigs and pick your favourite one.' That's what we did. In December last year we decided to record two gigs and see what happens. No pressure. In the end, everything you hear on that album is taken from one 90-minute set.

AAJ: The sound quality is good, are they used to recording live sets in this venue?

JV: No, the sound is actually pretty DIY. Harry mixed the whole thing. Obviously, doing a gig there every week for two years, we got to know the engineer there really well. He works on much bigger venues and he's a real pro. He was very keen to get involved.

As soon as the concept started growing, this idea of being super honest about the process and recording what happened on that one night, I got kind of obsessed with that philosophy of capturing the moment. In tandem to our gigs at the Gallimaufry, we've been doing these nights where an artist called Holysseus Fly (who is a member of another Bristol band called Ishmael Ensemble) would come and paint during our gigs. We would be playing, and she would do art improv, sort of synaesthesia painting, on a canvas. These nights were super fun. She would always get a fantastic response, and everybody loved her work, so it was really a no brainer to get her to do the album cover. The artwork is one of maybe five paintings that she did during that set and we picked our favourite for the cover.

We then decided to push the idea even further. The mixing process was very honest, there's no frills or add-ins, we just took segments of that gig and cut them into tracks. Then came the idea of the music video. We decided to film someone reacting to the music for the first time. We'd done some shows with a band called Nihilism who are in London. One of their members, a jazz violinist called Saskia Horton , is also a dancer. We'd met her and the whole band when we'd done some shows with them in London and in Bristol. Again, it was an obvious choice. She's a jazz musician and a dancer, she knows improv. It was a no-brainer: if we do a dance video it has to be her.

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